President Trump called out Joe Biden and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker by name Wednesday night for the death of Sheridan Gorman, the 18-year-old Loyola University freshman who was shot and killed near Chicago's lakefront last Thursday. The accused killer, 25-year-old illegal immigrant Jose Medina-Medina, crossed the border illegally in May 2023, was apprehended by Border Patrol, and was released into the country during the Biden administration, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
He was later arrested for shoplifting from a Macy's in Chicago. He was let go under the city's sanctuary policies.
Then, last Thursday, Medina-Medina allegedly pulled a gun on Gorman and her friends and shot the teenager in the head. Security cameras captured the entire attack. He was quickly arrested and charged with killing her.
Speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee's annual fundraising dinner in Washington, D.C., Trump laid the chain of failure out plainly, according to the New York Post:
"The illegal alien monster charged with Sheridan's brutal murder had come illegally from Venezuela and had been released into our country by Sleepy Joe Biden … pathetic, worst president."
He continued, saying Medina-Medina "was then arrested again and released again by the Democrat Governor JB Pritzker, one of the worst governors in the history of our country, in the sanctuary city of Chicago."
Two separate encounters with the system. Two opportunities to remove a man who had no legal right to be in the country. Both squandered. The first was by the federal government, which treated border apprehension as a formality before release. The second is a state and city apparatus that treats cooperation with immigration enforcement as something worse than the crimes illegal immigrants commit once freed.
Sheridan Gorman, a Westchester, New York, native who had come to Chicago to start college, is dead because the system worked exactly as Biden and Pritzker designed it to work.
The sanctuary framework depends on a very specific kind of moral arithmetic: that shielding illegal immigrants from federal authorities is a net good, and that whatever crimes some of them commit are an acceptable cost of that shielding. Advocates never phrase it that way, of course. They talk about "community trust" and "inclusive policing." But the math is the math. When you arrest a man who is in the country illegally and release him rather than coordinating with federal immigration authorities, you are betting that he won't do something terrible with his freedom.
Chicago lost that bet. Sheridan Gorman paid for it.
This is the part of the sanctuary debate that its proponents never want to have in concrete terms. It's easy to defend the policy in the abstract, in faculty lounges and press conferences. It becomes considerably harder when you have to explain to a family from Westchester why their daughter was shot in the head by a man the city had in custody and chose to release.
Trump didn't stop at assigning blame. He made an offer, one he's made before, and one Pritzker has never accepted:
"We could go to Chicago if that slob would allow us – if he'd just say, 'Please come, Mr. President. People are being killed here all the time. Please come.' I would come and you would have no crime practically."
He called the task "easy." Whether or not Chicago's violence problems have a simple solution, the president's willingness to commit federal resources stands in stark contrast to the posture of local leaders who treat federal law enforcement as an occupying force rather than a partner.
Trump framed the broader stakes with characteristic bluntness:
"Democrat politicians don't care about the American blood they spill in their very demented pursuit of these open borders."
Strong language. But consider what the gentler version of this argument looks like: Democrat politicians prioritize immigration non-enforcement over public safety. The polite version and the blunt version arrive at the same destination. One just gets there faster.
This story follows a template that has become grimly familiar:
Every link in that chain involves a policy choice. Not an accident, not an unforeseeable tragedy, but a deliberate decision by officials who chose ideology over enforcement. Border Patrol apprehended Medina-Medina. They had him. Chicago police arrested him for shoplifting. They had him. Both times, the political infrastructure surrounding those officers told them to let go.
Trump referenced his administration's broader "quest to restore public safety" and aimed at "corrupt Democrat officials who conspire to obstruct federal law." That language will predictably draw criticism from the same quarters that defend the sanctuary policies enabling cases like this one. The pattern sustains itself: officials obstruct enforcement, enforcement failures produce victims, and when anyone names the obstruction, the officials cry foul.
Sheridan Gorman was walking in a park with her friends. She was a college freshman, less than a year out of high school, starting the chapter of life that parents dream about for their children. She was shot in the head by a man who should not have been in the country, in a city that had him in custody and let him walk.
No amount of policy debate changes that. But the right policy might have prevented it.
